Chain of Shadows (Blood Skies, Book 6) (5 page)

He’d been trained to enter that refuge, a place where he ignored pain and fatigue.  When he set foot in the Deadlands he was utterly without fear.  Ronan had been trained to skirt the outer edges of that void, to walk its perimeter, but he’d never fully set foot into it.  He didn’t know what to expect. 

Some said the Deadlands were just a metaphor for a trance-like state, a peace and calm for a damaged consciousness.  Ronan and some others thought otherwise – that the Deadlands were actually another world, a place of quiet and darkness, much like the Whisperlands except one could master the control needed to come and go.  He had a feeling that’s where Cross was now.

Moments before his mind crossed over Ronan reached down and touched the twin blade.  Cold energy shot up his arms.  He screamed as ancient power lanced into his soul.

Ronan is adrift.  His feet find no purchase as he floats through a void of water and storm.  The air chills his skin blue.

He steps onto an island in the marsh.  Silver and grey mist cages him.  The air is silent and weighted with the stench of rot. 

Cross is there, seated on the ground, looking dazed and lost.   

Ronan walks over to him.  He can feel the wounds all over his body: shadows bleed from his chest, and his veins bulge black.  Ronan’s fingernails grow into claws.  He doesn’t need to see his own reflection to know his eyes have turned ebon.  Tufts of razor fur push out of his chest and face.

One of the beasts appears in the mist, a shadow-wreathed humanoid with a monstrous wolf’s head.  Its hands are capped with iron-cold talons.  Eyes like blades cut through the hazy darkness.

Ronan turns to face the creature.  Cross tries to rise and help, but Ronan shoves him away.  Only one of them will face the wolf.  Only one of them will suffer this fate. 

The air is thick with the stench of the monster’s unnatural presence.  The island begins to crumble and come apart.

Darkness explodes across his chest.  The still and silent air is broken by the sound of claws crunching through bone, the sound of blood glistening down edged nails. 

The sound of someone dying.

Drifting.

He isn’t dead.  Not yet.

He flies over fields of pain.  A young boy with a shock of black hair and a grim expression marches across a desert of skulls.  His naked back is raw with sunburns and scars from where the whip has landed.  His sandaled feet are bloody and blistered.

He is only one of many.

He is older, a boy of ten, alone in the mountains.  The thin shirt and clothing the Triangle has given him for this trial are as white as the snow, and the black steel katana in his hand is stained with blood.  The tracks of the Gorgoloth he’s slain lead back to their encampment.  He can’t leave until he’s killed them all.

He grows older.  His body is tired.  For the first time in his life he considers letting go.  Giving up.

He stands at the base of the steps, the cold stone stairs in a blasted wasteland of shattered stone and twisted trees.  He hears the waters of the Ebonsand crash against the shore.  The shrine stands above him, a dark outline against the red-purple dusk.  Columns have tumbled, and the stone is cracked.  There are over a hundred steps built into the side of the hill.  A hundred steps he’ll never take.

Falling.

Steel hard claws push through his organs.  He screams, but everything is silent. 

His body crashes into mud and stones.  Bones shatter.  His skull is crushed.  Blood explodes from his skin. 

All that’s left of him is a stain.  His spattered form covers the wolf-beast in a glaze of claret and gore.  He seeps into the beast, and it seeps into him.  What was once Ronan bleeds through the creature’s fur and melts along its briny ebon skin.  His blood and brains slither and ooze into its pores. 

He’s nothing.  Just liquid now, a waterfall of his own remains.

And yet he smells darkness ripple through the wolf’s body.  He swims in veins like tunnels and passes through its black heart, falls through a veil of stars and into a maelstrom of blood.

Something waits for him there.

His body isn’t his own, but he won’t surrender to the beast he’s meant to become.  Talons and fur and moon curve eyes, jagged bones like broken swords. 

The two souls do battle.  Its hunger is great, and it wants more than he’s willing to give.  They fight through a sea of exploding clouds. 

Ronan’s head goes dull with pain.  He shakes himself.

You’re stronger than this.  These are the Deadlands.  This is where you live.

His hands grow blades, and he tears into the wolf-beast.  Splitting pain rings through his jaw as his teeth stretch to fangs.  Hurt shakes his skull. 

He howls as he cuts down the other wolf, and the sound echoes into the Deadland void.

Not human now.  He’s not sure what he is.

He’s back in control, but he isn’t sure what that means, because he never lost control.  He’s always been this monster.

The beast walks through the marsh.  Clawed feet sink in black water and grey sand.  The sky is a swirl of silver clouds and ripples of shadow.  He hears peels of distant thunder and the fall of rain.

The wolf steps onto the island.  His talons drag in the soil.  Everything around him is frozen in black and white. 

The once warlock lies on the ground, still too weak to move.

Some instinct tells the wolf not to hurt the warlock, but it’s difficult.  He needs flesh.  He hasn’t fed in so very long.  As he treks up the sand his mind flashes back to the world on the other side of the void.

Caverns of night, columns of fire.  Islands of black rock shattered by a storm of scars.  Doorways of moonshadow.  Monuments of frozen skin. 

They held dominion there, the masters of the void.  Until the revolution, none dared oppose their power.  He still sees the betrayal, still tastes the fear and hears the cries as the barrier cracks.  The ship breaks the walls around their realm in a mad bid to escape, and the essence of their universe leaks away.

The wolf steps forward and looms over the once warlock.  The man can barely raise his head.  Claws rise to strike.

Cross lifts Soulrazor/Avenger.  The shards of the barrier, honed to razor points and turned to weapons.

The wolf hesitates.  For some reason it senses the man is meant to live, if for no other reason than because those first two blades are fused to the consciousness of the Pale Goddess. 

The beast steps back.  It’s hungry.  It wants to feed.

But not yet.

Ronan woke.  Splitting pain rang through his head, and blood pounded in his ears. 

“
Get up!” Danica yelled. 

Howls peeled from out of the dark.  Whatever was chasing them was close.

Ronan looked down at Cross.  He wasn’t sure why but he had the sense he’d helped him, that he’d somehow found him in the Deadlands and pulled him back.

“
Cross!” he said.

“
Whatever you’re doing, hurry up!” Wara shouted.  She fired into the dark.

Ronan reached down and shook Cross, and Cross’s eyes flashed open.  The bleeding had stopped.  Ronan looked at his own arms and realized he wasn’t bleeding either, though he still looked like he’d been dragged through a field of glass.  Strength rushed back into his body.  He felt alive, vital. 

Something burned in his chest, just for a moment – a deep pain, a cold burning that made his ribs hurt, but it vanished as quickly as it had come, and he could breathe better than before.

They shot their weapons into the darkness.  The howls were louder.  Whatever was there had at last decided they were a threat, and it wanted them destroyed.   

Cross was on his feet, and both and he and Ronan moved ahead of the others.  Danica and the Doj woman fired at the approaching mass.  Grail launched arrows that ignited the air with white fire.  

Ronan’s muscles ached, but he felt stronger than he had in days.  He grabbed Cross and they struggled up the slope, navigating past the standing stones.

Something tugged at his consciousness, some sense of dark familiarity, like a place he knew but never wanted to go back to.  The black shards of rock smoked with glacial cold and the dull red runes pulsed and hummed.

Cross saw it, too.  For a moment they both hesitated, entranced.  They listened to the silence.  There were no gunshots in that network of stones, no howls.  Nothing but the fluid moment, the breath before the scream.

Somehow they snapped from their reverie and ran past the broken monuments, and the sound of gunfire returned. 

Cross held a sending stone in hand as they raced up the ravine.  Icy water splashed onto Ronan’s face.  Everything shook, a blur of gasping images.  They scrambled and ran, scraped up the steep walls.  The light overhead was pale blue obscured by frost-grey mist, but the vapors parted beneath the blast of turbine engines directly overhead.  He heard the dull roar of a Bloodhawk. 

He turned.  For some reason he didn’t want to leave.  He knew it wasn’t his desire, but that of another.  The need of something inside him.  His blood boiled and his gums ached.  Something rattled within, a tremble that made his fists clench.

Ronan fought something, buried it deep down.  Already he was forgetting what had happened.

The Bloodhawk came into view just over the ravine.  Rope ladders unrolled from the back of the open hatch and smacked onto the stone.  Chainguns and auto-cannons sent hot shells raining down on the glass ice.  Ronan couldn’t hear anything but those explosive bursts. 

A sea of shadows came at them from below, swirling ebon storms bound to a trio of walking wolves with massive claws and wide slathering fangs and white-yellow eyes of crippling cold moonlight.  Darkness trailed them.

Ronan climbed.  He didn’t remember getting onto the ladder, but he had.  He glanced down and saw Cross below him.

They were on the ship.  Everything was moving fast.  Time stuttered ahead.  He was near the rear cargo door, looking out.  Turbine engines roared through the sky, the unmistakable scream of Deathhawks. 

The island was distant now, the size of a toy, but the cargo doors were still open, some malfunction, and that was why the air sliced through the inside of the ship, forcing the surviving soldiers of the doomed mission to hold on for their lives.

A dozen sleek black vessels ripped through the ice-sharp air.  Missiles  rained down on the island, leaving thin trails of black smoke in their wake. 

The soldiers on the Bloodhawk saw the explosions before they heard them: dull white and blue bursts of light, bulbs of illumination like drops of electric water.  Thick streams of smoke rolled away as the island was consumed by hellish flames.

The sounds of the blast followed seconds later.  Staccato booms, a chain of concussive bursts echoing through the dawn sky.  The sound knifed through his skull. 

The ship rocked in place.  Soldiers held on as the vessel buckled from the force of the Hellbomb detonations.

After a few moments the world went quiet again save for the roar of the Bloodhawk’s engines.  The air tasted of explosive vapor and corrosive dust. 

All that was left of the island was a stain of shattered stone and burning sand.  Smoke smothered the sea.

Ronan winced in pain.  Something in his jaw tightened.  He heard a sound, a distant voice of cracking ice and acid fire. 

He looked around.  No one else seemed to hear it, but they
saw
something, something down below which drew their attention.  No one spoke.  Everyone watched the island in horror. 

“
Help,” Ronan groaned.  Danica lifted him to his feet.  He barely had the strength to stand. 

The ship tilted and lurched.  He sensed the open space all around them.  The air was freezing cold and the sky had turned gunmetal grey and filled with haze.

He looked at the island.  Three dark shapes hovered in the sky just over the sea.  Lupine and humanoid, shadow and substance, they were larger than before, as big as Doj.  Their claws dripped viscous black fluid that boiled the water, and their eyes cast the air in a sickening pallor.  Ronan smelled the
wrongness
of them, the utter dark power oozing from their bodies.

“
Get us out of here,” Ankharra said into the comm.  “We have to get help.”

Ronan watched the dark figures recede as the Bloodhawk flew away.  He felt something dark gnawing at his body from within.

They were with him, somehow.  And he knew that no matter how badly he wanted to, whatever was there wouldn’t let him do or say anything about it. 

He was a prisoner to the beast inside him.

FOUR

PROMISE

Cross dreamed of wolves.  They tore his flesh and chewed on his remains until everything inside was gone. 

And then another dream, where it wasn’t him being eaten, but someone else.  Someone who’d taken his place.